Trans Women as Pregnant Women: A Story of Two Technologies

Abstract

This article recounts two moments in which revolutions in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) opened clinical questions and public debate about whether transgender women should receive doctors’ help to become pregnant. The first took place in Australia in the 1980s when advancements in in vitro fertilization and the accident of a full-term abdominal pregnancy opened the potential that people without uteruses could become pregnant. Critics of reproductive technology used the figure of “the pregnant transsexual” to represent the dangers of science and scientists run amok. Now nearly 40 years later, some advocates argue that trans women could receive uterus transplants to become pregnant. Critics have seized on this suggestion to ask whether all women deserve complex reproductive assistance. Based on archival research and interviews with specialist surgeons, I compare these two moments to examine how the figure of the pregnant trans woman has shaped debates about ARTs and how the possible use of ARTs has shaped discussions of the maternal status of trans women. Consistent across these moments is a recognition of ARTs as themselves gender-confirming technologies. The power of their use to confer a fundamental femininity has pervaded anxieties about trans women as beneficiaries of ARTs.

Keywords:

• Assisted reproductive technologies
• transgender
• IVF
• uterus transplant
• kinship

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Noah Riseman for connecting me to valuable archival materials. Thanks to participants in the Trans/Medicine Workshop at Johns Hopkins University and STS Inside Out at University of Arizona for feedback on early sections of this paper.

Notes

1 This was the terminology in use at the time, including among self-described transsexuals. It is important to use it here both to avoid anachronism and because of the specifically medical connotation of the term at that moment. I say “transsexual women” because, like in most clinics in the 1970s, nearly all patients were trans women rather than trans men (Riseman 2022).

2 Originally opened at Queen Victoria Hospital and called the Melbourne Gender Dysphoria Clinic, the clinic was transferred to Monash Health in 1987 and became the Monash Gender Dysphoria Clinic.

3 All quotations from the program Nationwide, June 11, 1984. Footage courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Company.

4 All quotations from interview with the author, January 28, 2022.

5 https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/surgery-could-give-men-wombs-1302360099545142.html

6 https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/09/15/uterus-transplants-are-already-a-reality-what-does-it-mean-for-transgender-women-getting-p